[A] Spanish university concluded that Spain’s “green jobs” program has cost the country about $800,000 and 2.2 jobs per each job created. Spain’s program had been cited eight times by the Obama administration as being the model for its vision of a U.S. “green jobs” program.

For decades we were lectured about the EU’s nuanced practice of “soft power,” and we were told how life was at last good when one garnered cradle-to-grave government entitlements, retired early, and expected American arms to protect and German money to subsidize the collective borrowing binge. Apparently because Europeans did not drawl and go to church, we were supposed to believe that they had reinvented finance, and loans could be floated rather than paid back.

In 2009, the vision of the new Obama administration was European: foreign-policy triangulation, government takeovers of private enterprises, higher taxes, more entitlements and public workers, and always more “them/us” class-warfare rhetoric from members of a technocratic guardian class who had played the very system they were now to oversee. Apparently Obama’s high-level appointees — from Timothy Geithner to Van Jones — thought they were our versions of Brussels bureaucrats, who could say and do anything with no need to worry about popular reaction.

And then came Greece. Oh, but there’s much more and you must go read it all. But one bit more:

What is common to all these disillusionments — the intolerance and dishonesty of environmental extremism, the European Union crackup, and Barack Obama’s renewal of Jimmy Carter’s failed foreign policy? They all can be traced to a global Western elite that in its intellectual arrogance confused late-20th-century technological progress with a supposed evolution in human nature itself. Heaven on earth was to be ushered in by those who deemed themselves so wise and so moral that they could remake civilization in their own image — even if that sometimes meant the end of disinterested research, basic arithmetic, and simple common sense.